Newspapers help educate

March 8, 2005

It’s hard to think of any ingredient to success as important as a good education. Unique talents, be they athletic, artistic or scholastic, certainly play their roles. Hard work always has its place. Even dumb luck leads some to success.

Whatever other factors help a person find success, none has played a leading role for so many people as education. That’s why so many students find the Portales News-Tribune in their classrooms each week. Newspapers educate. This newspaper, like others across the country, provides newspapers to schools as part of the Newspapers in Education program. This week is NIE Week, marking the role newspapers play in educating the public about things big and small.

The PNT distributes about 1,350 newspapers to 40 classrooms a week to help broaden the minds of area young people and to introduce them to reading the newspaper regularly. The costs are covered by Southwest Dairy Farmers.

Newspapers line up with school courses better than any other medium. You can get all this and more from the Internet, but not on one Web site — outside of a newspaper’s site. The newspaper complements the lesson plan.

A newspaper serves as the local history lesson, recording each day’s events. However, history is hardly the only course involved while reading a newspaper.
You get a lesson in English. A newspaper is filled with examples of wonderful English usage, either the direct writing of a breaking news story or the playful turns of words in a good human interest story.

Want social studies? A newspaper takes its readers across the world, be it the latest uprising in Iraq, a disaster in Asia, the latest royal news from Britain or any other unpredictable event from any spot on the globe.

There’s math and science. Recent topics have dealt with nanotechnology and stem cell research. Math can be found in stories and advertisements, whether it be coupons, discounts or percentages of people voting on an issue.

We’ve got art. You’ll find the work of creative graphic artists who help stories and advertisements come to life through their work.

And there’s gym class. The sports section is one of the most popular features in any newspaper. That is particularly true for the young readers we want to become familiar with regularly reading a newspaper. The stars of those high school sports stories are their classmates, their siblings, their neighbors, themselves.

Again, a newspaper complements a young person’s education. Few young people are going to benefit from all the mentioned features of a newspaper each time they pick one up. But, even as they go to their specific sections, they’re bound to absorb some of the other information. These young people will become more interested — more informed — about the world in which they live.

If you’d like more information about NIE, contact Lynn Berry, the paper’s community relations and NIE coordinator, at 763-3431 or by e-mail: